Jonathan R. Pritchard’s Homepage

I’d like to thank Richard Hutchinson, Team Leader at Orange UK’s telephone services, for settling a dispute over a faulty Sony Ericsson W910i.

The phone failed prematurely within the 6 month period which is protected under the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (as amended) which states that a fault within 6 months is presumed to have been present at sale and therefore replacement must be issued.

I find it really disappointing and frustrating however that Orange UK, which appears to be an ethical and caring company on the face of things (Orange Wednesdays, Orange Film etc.) is so hard-nosed and stupid when it comes down to customer loyalty. Six people I know have signed up to Orange because of recommendations from friends and the collective spending power of small families alone is enough to justify correct business behaviour.

Why cut off your nose to spite your face? That is what Orange UK appear to be doing at times. I’ve been a customer for 8 years personally, I’m not sure how many thousands of pounds that add up to. Mobile phones are a competitive market and Orange UK aren’t seeming very competitive on such things as unlimited data plans and usage of 3G enabled mobile phones as laptop modems.

They want to stiff you for every penny you’ve got. If you sell someone a faulty good, you should expect to replace it without charge to the user. If their claim falls outside of your warranty but is still within manufacturers warranty you should be an intermediary for them and offer to waive the delivery charges - that’s good sense. As Mr. Hutchinson’s colleague said to me “we don’t sell you a phone, we sell you the airtime. We give you the phone to use the air time”. Legalese and loopholes like that should be highlighted by the mass media much more. Hold these companies to account.

It’s the small things with Orange like having to pay to listen to voice mail, like having to pay 35p for an Orange Wednesday text. Like being charged for magic numbers on pay-as-you-go even if the other person doesn’t pick up. That’s unfortunate.

Thanks again. However I shall be thinking whether to exercise my right as a consumer to go elsewhere in future - that’s the beauty of the free market. Don’t deliver and you won’t win the contract.

Users of AVG Free 7.5 will have no doubt been harried by AVG with pop-up notifications telling you to upgrade to AVG8. Unhelpfully the link points to the paid version; one now has to dig through pages on the AVG website to find the free version which does still exist!

However, it’s a small mercy. AVG, the new company name for Grisoft, the manufacturers of AVG anti-virus software have decided to put a lot of bloat in their once streamlined software. A pop-up notification now greets the user attached to the bottom of the Control Centre and a new component, the LinkScanner, which may be thought of as well intentioned but it duplicates functionality that is already built into Firefox. Furthermore, when the LinkScanner is disabled it puts AVG8 into a constant sense of panic: the tray icon starts to constantly report that something is wrong, signalling this with an exclamation mark over the tray icon.

After a quick search I found this article which not only shows you how to install AVG8 without the LinkScanner but how to remove the annoying notifications. I reproduce these in my own words below.

Installing AVG8 Without LinkScanner

1. Uninstall AVG7.5 first through the ‘Add/Remove Software’ menu in ‘My Computer’.
2. Download AVG Free 8 from here, choose the link that says ‘Download AVG Free 8.0 (AVG server)‘.
3. Rename the file to ‘avgfree8.exe‘.
4. Move or copy the file to ‘C:\’ hard drive or the primary windows hard drive.
5. Open a command prompt by going to ‘Start -> Run’ and typing ‘cmd’.
6. Type ‘cd\‘ (That’s a backslash)
7. And then copy the following text and paste it into the command prompt you opened by right-clicking:
   avgfree8.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
8. Follow through the installation but decline to install the toolbar and deny permission to share information with AVG.

Removing the Control Centre Pop-Up Notification

1. Navigate to ‘C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8′, or wherever you installed AVG8.
2. Rename the files: ‘avgmwdef_us.mht‘ and ‘avgresf.dll‘ by adding ‘.disabled‘ to the end of each.
   So they will become: ‘avgmwdef_us.mht.disabled‘ and ‘avgresf.dll.disabled‘ respectively.

I identify myself as a believer in capitalism, free-enterprise and free-market economics. I also have a strong affinity for the Conservative party. However, I don’t agree with a number of Conservative policies, be they ideological or just ill-thought out. Indeed I find that I want to nationalise the railways, increase funding of state schools and take away the tax breaks on independent ones; as well as reform and create a strong NHS.

Education is close to most people’s hearts, be it from our memories of our school days, or the wishes of parents for their children, the human resource of the future, to do well, get ahead and have a strong foundation for the future. It is in this background that David Cameron’s attacks on grammar schools were arguably his most misguided move, apart from WebCameron; it doesn’t look good when an Eton and Oxford-educated man denounces grammar schools which I see as a key proponent of social mobility. The defence of which was a key Conservative policy.

It is no wonder why school standards are falling under a Labour government that prefers comprehensive schools completely forgetting the point that education needs to be universally accessible: giving everyone the chance to make the most if their god given gifts and it needs to be uniform.

The creation and protection of selective schools is not a discriminatory policy for the privileged. It is not an example of ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Grammar schools are a key method for the bright, but deprived, to reach higher grounds. Education has always been a tool out of the vicious cycle of poverty, and frankly, now it is gone or in decline.

There has been so much panic in recent months - that is before Labour’s poor showing in the local elections and the Crewe and Nantwich byelection - the fact that our future economy is going to have a shortfall of well-educated graduates in the labour market. This of course is a direct consequence of poor educational standards in schools.

It is not a huge jump, therefore, to look at the school rankings and notice that the independent schools and the grammar schools dominate the top of these charts. It is not the fault of independent schools who have always been well privately-funded and have maintained standards. It is a loss of our valuable assets in state schools of grammar schools across the country, bar the home counties and a various spattering around the country.

Just like the NHS, education in our schools is mortally important for the country. Just as every NHS Trust needs to be up to standard across the country so does every school. Those that oppose grammar schools speak of the unfair, undue pressure put upon the shoulders of 11-year olds and talk of it’s crippling psychological damage of being labelled a ‘loser’ by themselves or others. They fail to realise in this analysis that there is the 12 and 13-plus exams if they don’t get in the first time round. there is also the case of appeal, which a significant minority win. Finally there is also the choice of school for sixth form.

Why cripple social mobility? Why ruin our children’s chances? This is the state of our politically correct, but ignorant government. In my eyes, David Cameron not only joined the government on this failure of policy but has forsaken the likes of Margraret Thatcher and Edward Heath who are grammar-school educated. It is he, who is clearly discriminatory in his command as Leader of the Opposition; having 13 out of ~20 shadow cabinet ministers from Eton is akin to the problem that the Labour party has with Scots in the cabinet. I’d say Cameron’s cabinet problem is the greater.

How do we pay for all of this? Well the Conservative party say they believe there is at least £7 Billion of waste in the government’s various departments, how about you look at the waste that’s been going on in the NHS computer system which adds up to Billions alone. £50 Million to fix a computer program that was speaking in German. We’ve got to make people accountable again.

Early in the night, on both CNN and Fox News (BBC’s coverage was patchy, best to switch to an American news broadcaster) were declaring that Clinton had to win by 10-12 percentage points to call it a big success, or a “sea change”. Reading once again too much into the exit polls, which were predicting a 4-point lead to Clinton, they dismissed her - before the votes had even been fully counted. How wrong were they! During Obama’s speech Clinton’s margin went up another two points to reach a full 10-point lead over him. It held steady until all the counties had reported in.

Talk of ruining the Democratic party and helping McCain’s campaign as it rolls onto November were overblown. We see today in the news that it is in fact the energising of the electorate and the several hundred-thousand new registered democratic voters that is highlighted today.

The truth of the matter is that Clinton is going to win this nomination be it at the party convention in Denver or before. If she can close the gap, the same way Obama did in Pennsylvania but in North Carolina and if she can hold on to Indiana then she will have the stronger case to being handed the nomination by the super-delegates.

In the run up to Pennsylvania’s primary he muddied his campaign, he harmed the brand that preaches of hope and change and a “new politics”. He was defused in the ABC debate by Clinton in a way that he had not been before. If only he could have spoken in the manner he did at his conciliation speech after the results were coming in this morning (GMT).

Clinton has wised up too. If she had continued her personal, emotional appeal to voters that we had a glimpse of in that cafe in New Hampshire then she would have done a lot better in the smaller states that were picked up by Obama, bottom line being a delegate count and popular vote more in line with a definitive winner. She has also emphasised her website and I’m sure the donations will come rolling in, she has the momentum now.

In a smart move by her, she did not lay in to Obama with her victory speech - I think she was in fact the nicest she’d been to him in a long while. I think we’ll find ultimately what happens is that Clinton will have the pole position on the democratic ticket and Obama will be her second. It is the only way.

It is criminal in my opinion for gaming devices, which are ever more popular, to support such lowly encryption methods as only WEP - which has been thoroughly hacked over and over again and is useless. All WEP encryption will stop is the man sitting outside your house in his car, typing away on his laptop, not even that really if he has any sense he can crack the key in under 15 minutes.

Related to this is the Wii, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP’s support of only 802.11b. The 802.11g protocol had been aroung long before the release of these devices yet they didn’t see fit to support this higher bandwidth protocol.

I argue that security features like this are far more important than parental controls. Having to downgrade one’s wireless security setup to something inferior such as WEP to have it supported by all devices is a terrible situation akin to being between a rock and a hard place. Do you want to lose functionality or do you want to lose security - you simply should never be put in this position by a responsible company. If this was a business grade product then it would not have been tolerated.

At least the Nintendo Wii supports WPA2-PSK (AES) but it’s far from an ideal situation. You have to sacrifice speed of the overall network to run in mixed mode and not 802.11g only mode.

Why is MonoDevelop not available for Windows considering it has finally reached it’s 1.0 release?

I’ve just bought CODE IT!, a Linux Format special, it’s subject being programming. A lot of the examples use Microsoft C#, but I’m not interested. I don’t want to learn anything unless I can apply it in a cross-platform way.

I’m really disappointed that there isn’t even a binary available for it. It’s 2008 and all that is available is this page, detailing that there is work going on¹ but it’s not really a priority, as it’s nowhere to be seen on their TODO list.

Update (09/04/08): After some further searching on the head-honcho of Mono’s blog,² I find that in this post regarding MonoDevelop 1.0’s release, a windows port is a stated future goal. The extract follows. It is dated March 14th of this year:

Windows Port: There is now a Windows profile release of MonoDevelop. This will be great for developers that are building applications using Gtk# on Windows and want to get access to the Stetic GUI designer which currently requires them to use Linux to do this. It is not our intention to compete with SharpDevelop as an open source IDE for Windows Programmers although there might be some overlap.

1. Although from my quick google searching, people have been talking about this since 2005/06 [↩]
2. Miguel de Icaza [↩]

I’m putting it up here so I’ll remember it, looks like a pretty useful bit of information, get it here.

I have always maintained, as a person view of mine that Facebook is just a fad. It offers no innovations in social networking indeed it is perhaps more of a privacy risk than MySpace - both of which will not allow you to delete your account and with it your personal information.

TheRegister.co.uk¹ reports that for the first time, this month the number of active users decreased. This is significant, it’s growth curve is flattening. Over-hyped market evaluations of $15 billion are far from sight now. The legal cases of ownership of the principle of Facebook, are worthless. Whether it is a more general disengagement of the youth from social networking sites, I do not know. It just goes to show how quick the trends change, the youth make you and then they leave you; just like it has always been. Perhaps this is extrapolated by the fact things tend to happen on the web quicker than ever, as a magnifying glass for the world.

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/21/fb_nielsen_fall/ [↩]

David Ascher, the man charged with managing the Mozilla spun off company previously referred to as MailCo, has today announced the formation of Mozilla Messaging, Inc. It’s purpose has extraordinary vision and tangible goals, starting with the engineering of Thunderbird 3.

This is the culmination and also the genesis of exciting times in messaging. What Ascher talks of is an integrated messaging experience that quite possibly will be revolutionary, hopefully to the extent of Mozilla Firefox’s success.

Interesting points to my eyes are his perception of Thunderbird’s current inherent strengths and weaknesses. Having a world class web stack already integrated into Thunderbird as well as the extensibility that has set Firefox apart from it’s competitors. The most important parts with regards to Thunderbird 3 are the user interface improvements and the interesting announcement of built-in calendar support. Whether this will absorb Mozilla Lightning’s duties I am not sure at this time.

Once more, communication, I think is Ascher’s best personal skill - something that’ll stand him in good stead in the years to come, on his and the company’s task to transform messaging and email into something more relevant to today.

Exciting times definitely. I’ve subscribed to the mailing list.

I’ve just updated Optimoz Tweaks 0.4 for use with Firefox 3 and greater using this document from the MDC (Mozilla Developer Center). It was a very simple process as always, which I’m glad of.

I’ve also updated the main page on Mozillazine Forums and contacted seamaiden from addonsmirror.net, which is our secondary mirror.

You can use it by clicking the link below and selecting ‘Save As’ or ‘Save File’. I recommend saving it to your desktop so you can easily find it. Then just follow the steps below the download link.

Enjoy.

>>> Optimoz Tweaks 0.4 Firefox 3 Fixed <<<

How To Install Optimoz Tweaks on Firefox 3

1. Download the Optimoz Tweaks file from the link above.
2. Open Firefox 3.
3. Go to ‘Tools -> Add-Ons’.
4. Click and drag the file onto the ‘Add Ons’ window.